Data storage systems can be incorporated into a wide range of devices, including laptop or desktop computers, tablet computers, digital video recorders, set-top boxes, digital recording devices, digital media players, video gaming devices, video game consoles, cellular telephones, and the like. Magnetic data storage systems include one or more magnetic disks, each comprised of magnetization areas that can be oriented in one of two directions. A magnetic transducer is used to read data from a disk and write data to the disk. Different magnetic recording techniques may be used to store data to the disk. Magnetic recording techniques include, for example, longitudinal magnetic recording (LMR), perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), and shingled magnetic recording (SMR). Heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) may be used with LMR, PMR, or SMR.
Magnetic transducers (in particular those utilizing write heads with trailing and side shield designs) are known to exhibit adjacent track erasure/interference (ATI) and far track erasure/interference (FTI or XTI). This phenomenon results in erasure or partial demagnetization of magnetic transitions recording on side tracks when the center track is being re-written. While ATI effects are generally caused by some amount of fringe fields in the neighborhood of the main recording pole, the origin of FTI effects are complicated. Far track erasure is thought to be caused by “hot spots” in the write head shields, generated by domain wall excitation/switching during head switching. Detection of ATI and FTI effects is a time-consuming and complicated process. A computationally simple and time-effective system and method for identifying ATI/FTI effects would therefore be beneficial.